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Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

code.claude.com

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Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#361

Post by croes »

airstrike wrote: post #140
croes wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why does it matter which program you use to consume the tokens? The sounds like a confession that claude code is somewhat wasteful at token use.

No, it's a confession they have no moat other than trying to hold onto the best model for a given use case. I find that competitive edge unlikely to last meaningfully in the long term, but this is still a contrarian view. More recently, people have started to wise up to the view that the value is in the application layer https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/reports/2026-state-of-a...

But if more users use your service you get an advantage. Letting the users chose their tool for that would be a good thing.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#362

Post by beAbU »

wiseowise wrote: post #347
pirsquare wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook doing that is actually good, to protect consumers from data abuse after incidents like cambridge analytica. They are holding businesses who touches your personal data responsible.

Is it? I’ve never touched Facebook api, but it sounds ridiculous that you need to provide tax details for DEVELOPMENT. Can’t they implement some kind of a sandbox with dummy data?

WhatsApp takes bot spam very very seriously, and as a result, there is zero bot spam.

Before you can sign up to build a WhatsApp bot, you need to jump through a million hoops, and after that, every automated message template must be vetted by Meta before it can be sent out, apple style.

I'm glad of this, because unlike SMS and other messaging platforms, WhatsApp is spam free and a pleasure to use.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#363

Post by dannersy »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #352
dannersy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this is the most predicable outcome ever. The software industry at large does this over and over again and somehow we're surprised. Provide thing for free or for cheap, and then slowly draw back availability once you have dominant market share or find yourself needing money (ahem). The providers want to control what AI does to make money or dominate an industry so they don't have to make their money b…

because it's easier than paying $50k for local llm setup that might not last 5 years.

Well, yes. They know what they are doing. They know when given the option the consumer makes the affordable choice. I just don't have to like or condone their practices. Maybe instead of taking on billions of dollars of debt they should have thought about a business model that makes sense first? Maybe the collective "we" (consumers and investors, but especially investors) should keep it in our pants until the product is proven and sustainable?

It will be real interesting if the haters are right and this technology is not the breakthrough the investors assume it to be AFTER it is already sewn into everyone's work flows. Everyone keeps talking about how jobs will be displaced, yet few are asking what happens when a dependency is swept out from underneath the industry as a whole if/when this massive gamble doesn't pay off.

Whatever. I am squawking into the void as we just repeat history.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#364

Post by imafish »

latexr wrote: post #358
seu wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week Is a week the whole attention timespan of the late 2020s?

We’re still in the mid-late 2020s. Once we really get to the late 2020s, attention spans won’t be long enough to even finish reading your comment. People will be speaking (not typing) to LLMs and getting distracted mid-sentence.

Seems we're already there.

My brain trailed off after "won’t be long enough to even finish"...

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#365

Post by mirzap »

maplethorpe wrote: post #317
mirzap wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models. Banning third-party tools has nothing to do with rate limits. They’re trying to position themselves as the Apple of AI companies -a walled garden. They may soon discover that screwi…

Didn't OpenAI spend like 10 billion on inference in 2025? Which is around the same as their total revenue? Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?

When you have 800–900 million active users, no matter how cheap it is, your costs will be in the billions.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#366

Post by KingMob »

mirzap wrote: post #211
KingMob wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not losing money on subscription plans. Inference is very cheap - just a few dollars per million tokens. What they’re trying to do is bundle R&D costs with inference so they can fund the training of the next generation of models. You've described every R&D company ever. "Synthesizing drugs is cheap - just a few dollars per million pills. They're trying to bundle pharmaceutical research costs... etc." There…

I’m not saying charging above marginal cost to fund R&D is weird. That’s how every R&D company works. My point was simpler: they’re almost certainly not losing money on subscriptions because of inference. Inference is relatively cheap. And of course the big cost is training and ongoing R&D. The real issue is the market they’re in. They’re competing with companies like Kimi and DeepSeek that also spend heavily on R&D…

Yes, and my point is that thinking the cost of subscriptions is only inference, and not the research, is mistaken.

They can totally lose money on subscriptions despite the costs of inference, because research costs have to be counted too.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#367

Post by kgwgk »

croes wrote: post #357
KingMob wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because their flat rate pricing is based off their ability to manage token use via their first-party tools. A third-party tool may be less efficient in saving costs (I have heard many of them don't hit Anthropic LLMs' caches as well). Would you be willing to pay more for your plan, to subsidize the use of third-party tools by others? --- Note, afaik, Anthropic hasn't come out and said this is the reason, b…

What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice? Would you pay for a streaming service that enforces a certain TV brand? Given the latest changes on Claude Code where they hide the actions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033622 it's likely more the other way around. They control how fast your subscription tokens are burned

> What if I'm only willing to pay if it support by tool of choice?

I don’t want to say that you won’t be missed but they will get over it.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#368

Post by kilroy123 »

ifwinterco wrote: post #313
andreagrandi wrote: post #273

I'm only waiting for OpenAI to provide an equivalet ~100 USD subscription to entirely ditch Claude. Opus has gone down the hill continously in the last week (and before you start flooding with replies, I've been testing opus/codex in parallel for the last week, I've plenty of examples of Claude going off track, then apologising, then saying "now it's all fixed!" and then only fixing part of it, when codex nailed at t…

Opus 4.6 genuinely seems worse than 4.5 was in Q4 2025 for me. I know everyone always says this and anecdote != data but this is the first time I've really felt it with a new model to the point where I still reach for the old one. I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think

I agree with you. Codex 5.3 is good it's just a bit slower.

Re: Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

#369

Post by Loic »

bilekas wrote: post #314

It might be some confirmation bias here on my part but it feels as if companies are becoming more and more hostile to their API users. Recently Spotify basically nuked their API with zero urgency to fix it, redit has a whole convoluted npm package your obliged to use to create a bot, Facebook requires you to provide registered company and tax details even for development with some permissions. Am I just old man screa…

They put no limits on the API usage, as long as you pay.

Here, they put limits on the "under-cover" use of the subscription. If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use, this is because they can control the stuff end-to-end, the application running on your system (Claude Code, Claude Desktop) and their systems.

As you subscribe to these plans, this is the "contract", you can use only through their tools. If you want full freedom, use the API, with a per token pricing.

For me, this is fair.

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